Should 10-10 rounds exist in MMA?

It doesn’t seem like it ought to be a difficult question. The fact that the 10-point must scoring system allows for it should, in theory, be all the answer we need. Sometimes rounds are obviously one-sided. Sometimes they’re very close. It’s bound to happen on occasion that rounds are too close to call, at which point they should be scored even. Right?

Maybe not, according to Nevada State Athletic Commission Executive Director Bob Bennett, who showed up at the UFC 209 post-fight press conference on Saturday night in Las Vegas to give his thoughts on scoring after the main event ended in a majority decision.

“If you’re a top-notch, A-plus judge, you should be able to discern, through the scoring criteria, who wins a fight even if it’s razor-thin,” Bennett said. “Does a 10-10 round come up? Yes, but in the almost three years I’ve been director, we have not had a 10-10 round, and I think it’s incumbent upon the judges to be on top of their game and be able to pick a winner in that round. Because one effective strike or kick can determine who wins a round.”

When MMAjunkie’s John Morgan asked whether Bennett was saying that judges should never render a 10-10 score, Bennett replied: “Not at all.”

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He doesn’t put any pressure on his judges, he explained. They’re free to score fights the way they see them.

Then again, he said this right after he said the thing about how good judges ought to be able to pick a winner, so it’s hard not to conclude that there’s at least a little implied pressure on judges to avoid calling rounds even.

Is that how it should be? On one hand, the whole purpose of having judges at cageside is to pick a winner in the event that the fighters can’t figure it out on their own. There might be some very close rounds, but how often is the action absolutely dead even?

On the other hand, if your position is that good judges will always be able to pick a winner (which suggests that anyone who doesn’t is therefore not a good judge), aren’t you essentially asking someone to perform a mental coin flip for those rounds where there really is very little daylight between the two fighters?

I asked Andy Foster, executive director of the California State Athletic Commission. He said he agreed with Bennett’s comments, adding that he typically regards 10-10 rounds as something that should be reserved for partial rounds in bouts halted by injuries or accidental fouls, and even then only if no significant action has taken place prior to the stoppage.

“If a judge can’t find something to find a winner in five minutes,” Foster told MMAjunkie, “I need a new judge.”

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Longtime referee John McCarthy concurred. While it’s necessary to retain the possibility of a 10-10 round, he said, “It cannot be a crutch for the judge.”

“I have only seen one round in a five-minute MMA round that I say was a 10-10,” McCarthy said. “That was the first round of Rafael Carvalho vs. Melvin Manhoef in Bellator. The first round was horrible with neither fighter doing anything.”

There’s some sense to this logic. Unless the two fighters spent the entirety of the previous round standing in place and staring at each other, you can almost always convince yourself that one got the upper hand. Even if the strikes and takedowns are numerically identical, you could decide that one fighter’s punch meant more than another fighter’s kick, and there you are.

But this brings us back to one of the most frequently identified problems with the 10-point-must system, which is that it fails to distinguish between winning by a little and winning by a lot.

For instance, take that fifth round between Woodley and Thompson. Bennett singled out judge Sal D’Amato for criticism after he scored that frame a 10-8 for Woodley, based primarily on the knockdown and near-finish late in a round that Thompson had otherwise controlled. A 10-8 there was “unacceptable,” according to Bennett.

“That judge should have scored that round 10-9,” he said at the post-event press conference. “You can’t have a three-point swing in 50 seconds.”

But then, scoring a round in which Woodley nearly ended the fight the same as you’d score a round like the first, which Thompson won by a much smaller margin, seems like a big part of the problem with the system.

If very close rounds shouldn’t be treated as even rounds, then shouldn’t there be more of a distinction between somewhat clear rounds and very clear rounds?

To an extent, the new scoring guidelines (which the Nevada commission has not yet adopted) may help clear that up. They call for a more liberal definition of what constitutes a 10-8 round, though it remains to be seen how it will work in practice.

Still, if we get fed up with tactics that rely on control without significant action, or an over-reliance on late bursts to “steal” close rounds, maybe we shouldn’t always blame the fighters. Maybe we should consider the scoring system that made them this way.